Saturday, June 18, 2011

Thanks for Reading

Thanks for reading. I am going to begin the blog with some articles I've written for other websites and/or publications. This initial blog should help us get acquainted. It was written in April of 2010, and published on the website "Injustice In Perugia," a website dedicated to the true justice for Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, two innocent kids sentenced to decades in prison in Italy for a murder with which they had nothing to do. Since I wrote this, much about my life has changed. But sadly, Amanda Knox, an innocent woman, and RaffaeleSollecito, an innocent man, remain in an Italian Prison because of police and prosecutorial misconduct.

My April article:

My name is Steve Moore; I retired from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 2008 after 25 years as a Special Agent and Supervisory Special Agent. Of that time, my entire investigative experience was in violent crime. In my last such assignment, I was the Supervisor of the Al Qaeda Investigations squad, following which I ran the FBI’s Los Angeles-based “Extra-Territorial Squad”, which was tasked with responding to any acts of terrorism against the United States in Asia and Pakistan. I received an award for investigative excellence from the United States Attorney’s Office (Central District) in Los Angeles four years in a row. I was nominated for the FBI’s “Outstanding Counterterrorism Investigation” award. I have lectured at the International Law Enforcement Academy in Bangkok, and I served as a (term) Assistant Legal Attaché.

I do not know Amanda Knox. As I write this, I have never met or spoken with anybody in the Knox or Mellas families. In my 25 years in the FBI, I had come to believe that if you were arrested, you were probably guilty. I never had a person I took to trial who wasn’t convicted. I am especially irritated by guilty persons claiming their innocence.

I had heard snippets about Knox case from the news, and believed that Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito were certainly guilty. But then I began to hear assertions from the press that contradicted known facts. Wanting to resolve the conflicts, I looked into the case out of curiosity. The more I looked, the more I was troubled by what I found. So I looked deeper, and I ended up looking at every bit of information I could find (and there’s a lot of it). The more I investigated the more I realized that Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito had NOTHING TO DO with the murder of Meredith Kercher. Every rule of good investigation was violated.

The case is completely flawed in every way. The physical evidence against Amanda and Raffaele is flawed, contrived, misinterpreted, and (to put it kindly) misstated. The other “evidence” is made up of (embarrassingly naïve) hunches and bias. The alleged motive and modus operandi of Knox/Sollecito is so tortured that it defies credibility. In the U.S., the totality of the evidence and the hunches of the investigators would not have been sufficient to get a search warrant, much less take somebody to trial. I spent years of my life working on cases in the federal courts.

“FACTS DETERMINE CONCLUSIONS”—The universal truism of investigation. The instant that conclusions determine your facts, you have corrupted the judicial system. Young or inexperienced investigators have a tendency to believe their own hunches. This is dangerous, because uneducated hunches are usually wrong. Hunches are not bad, they just need to be allowed to die a natural death when evidence proves them wrong. The sign of an investigation run amok is when an initial hunch is nurtured and kept on life support long after evidence should have killed it. This is such a situation. In the Knox case, the investigators openly state:

“We knew she was guilty of murder without physical evidence.” --Fabio Giobbi, Investigator. Then, when physical evidence came in that did not support their story, they simply changed their story. And their suspects. And their murder weapons. And their motives.

I will only say of the interrogation, that if any FBI Agents I supervised had conducted that interrogation, they would have been indicted. I am not surprised that Amanda made incriminating and conflicting statements in such a horrible situation. I am more surprised that she didn’t make more incriminating statements, under such duress.

The investigators in this matter very obviously decided upon a conclusion, and bent, twisted and modified evidence to suit their conclusions. After the evidence came back that Rudy Guede sexually assaulted Meredith, it didn’t occur to the investigators that they had a simple rape/murder? The simplest answer is usually the correct answer. Crimes are only this complicated in James Bond movies.

A friend once said, “If you hear the sound of galloping outside, think “horse”, not “zebra”. The prosecutors in this case were intent on finding zebras. This case is about a prosecutor painting stripes on a horse.

Amanda would not even have been a suspect in any US investigation. A sex murder occurs and your prime suspect is the female roommate? Experienced, or simply competent investigators would have known that statistically, 90% of murders are committed by men. When women commit murder, only 16% use a knife, and close examination might show that the vast majority of those are gang-related. Any conclusion that involves a woman stabbing another woman is statistically so rare, that it should be looked at with great suspicion.

There is also a thing called “leakage”. Leakage is the tendency of homicidal or mentally ill people to ‘leak’ behavior that would indicate their true nature. If one is to believe that Amanda Knox was the murderous Svengali that she was made out to be, there is absolutely NO way that such sociopathic behavior would not be leaked in some significant way prior to this crime.

I have not met a single professional investigator, prosecutor or attorney who, when presented with the facts of this case, are not incredulous that this type of thing can happen in the 21st century. It's time to release these innocent kids.